Historicising the Idea of Human Rights
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321717752516 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717752516
Political Studies
2019, Vol. 67(1) 100 –115
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321717752516
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Historicising the Idea of
Human Rights
Robert Lamb
Abstract
An adequate interpretation of our liberal and cosmopolitan traditions depends absolutely on
an adequate understanding of the history of the idea of human rights. There is, however, deep
disagreement about this history. In this article, I argue that disagreement about the emergence of
human rights is resolvable and can be explained through attention to problematic methodological
commitments within exemplary historical narratives. I first consider, and reject, Micheline Ishay’s
claim that the concept of human rights can be found in the ancient world. I then move on to a
detailed critical engagement with Samuel Moyn’s contrary thesis that human rights are a radically
novel political phenomenon. I argue that Moyn’s analysis can only be taken seriously as an action-
based account of human rights and therefore cannot sustain the dramatic conclusion he advances.
I then defend an alternative, belief-based framework for approaching, and rethinking, the history
of the idea of human rights.
Keywords
human rights, history of ideas, liberalism, cosmopolitanism
Accepted: 15 December 2017
Introduction
The idea of human rights is central to contemporary liberal politics and international rela-
tions. For many, the increasingly global prominence of this concept – which demands a
universalistic suspension of any normative deference to nation, culture and context and
which is at the heart of so many justifications for international economic sanctions and
military interventions – represents the crowning achievement of modernity. As Charles
Beitz (2009: 1) observes, ‘today, if the public discourse of peacetime global society can
be said to have a common moral language, it is that of human rights’. And yet, despite the
ubiquity of human rights in political discourse and the significant amount of scholarly
analysis devoted to what it means conceptually, there remains no consensus whatsoever
about its history.
Department of Politics, University of Exeter, UK
Corresponding author:
Robert Lamb, Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Amory Building, Exeter EX4 4RJ, UK.
Email: r.lamb@exeter.ac.uk
752516PSX0010.1177/0032321717752516Political StudiesLamb
research-article2018
Article
Lamb 101
The point in time at which the idea of human rights crystallises into a distinct and
recognisable concept is a matter of considerable contestation. This contestation raises
questions about which historical figures can plausibly be ascribed theories of human
rights. Are, for example, commitments to human rights first identifiable in medieval
political thought – when the idea of subjective rights is widely thought to have emerged
as a moral concept – or, alternatively, in the articulation of early-modern natural rights
theories? Does the concept of human rights instead emerge as a distinct idea in the after-
math of the American and French Revolutions, or even later, in the twentieth century,
following the Second World War and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(UDHR)? Does it make sense to regard Aquinas, Grotius, Locke or Paine as theorists of
human rights, or would such readings be mistaken or anachronistic, and on what basis
might we make such assessments? Answering these questions – and determining how to
approach them – is vital for the self-understandings of modern political communities. An
adequate interpretation of our liberal and cosmopolitan traditions depends absolutely on
an adequate understanding of the history of the idea of human rights.
In this article, I provide a framework for addressing such questions about the history
of human rights through critical assessments of dominant approaches. I identify a sharp
scholarly disagreement over the emergence of human rights and argue that it can be
explained – and, in principle, resolved – through attention to the problematic methodo-
logical commitments that underpin rival historical narratives. Due to limitations of space,
I focus on two exemplary narratives, each of which, I argue, misconstrues the object of
study relevant to a historical understanding of the idea of human rights. Having attended
to their deficiencies, I delineate an alternative approach that enables the development of
criteria to assess rival claims about the original crystallisation of the idea of human rights
and thus determine which past authors can be thought to have advanced accounts of this
contested concept.
I begin with a relatively brief discussion of the ancient roots of human rights claimed
by Micheline Ishay. Her narrative is, I suggest, unconvincing because it understands an
intellectual commitment to human rights too broadly, as equivalent to an endorsement of
a supra-historical species of ethical universalism. I then consider, in much more detail, the
highly influential – but thus far insufficiently interrogated – thesis advanced by Samuel
Moyn, for whom the notion of human rights is radically novel, with its sudden emergence
locatable in the international politics of the 1970s. Through an extended engagement with
Moyn’s argument, I argue that it can plausibly be taken only as a practice-based account
of human rights and therefore cannot sustain the dramatic historical conclusion he
defends. My critique of Moyn’s thesis serves a constructive purpose: it enables me to
outline what a framework for thinking about history of the idea – rather than the practice
– of human rights would look like. Drawing on work in the philosophy of history (Bevir,
1999), I suggest that the appropriate object of study for a history of the idea of human
rights must be a cluster of normative and conceptual beliefs, one that is both historically
specific and philosophically abstract.
Human Rights as Supra-Historical Concept
What are the origins of human rights? This question has prompted various answers. Let
us begin with the view that the history of human rights stretches right back across time.
Such a view obviously carries with it a definite conception of what a human right is, one
that would seem to construe it as a supra-historical entity that is visible across cultures,
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